Tag: azure

Many years ago, Walter Wriston, former Chairman and CEO of Citicorp, startled the world by claiming information about money has become almost as important as money itself. More recently, the World Economic Summit at Davos published a report implying it was an economic asset as valuable as currency or gold.[i] The difference between ‘almost’ and…

It’s been almost fifty years since Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, goof-balled the mobile phone into the popular imagination when he used his shoe for clandestine conversations. A lot has happened since then in the ‘smart’ phone world. Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies are now out on Windows Phone 7. Nokia has released the amazing…

Written by David but inspired by Damien. For years, a business card has been the ultimate power statement, defining who we are by the title we have and the firm we represent. After a handshake we naturally exchange them. But what happens afterwards? I have more business cards than I know what to do with….

How are financial institutions adopting Cloud technology? Are private clouds more appropriate for the industry, and if so what benefits do they bring to organisations? On Tuesday I participated in a very interesting panel on Private Clouds at the Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit, mediated by Colin W. Gillis (BGC Financial), and made up of Bryan Beal from…

New rules are being written, demanding greater reporting from financial institutions to their respective regulators, and more rigorous stress testing for systemic players. To satisfy both these constraints, banks will need to store more data (both real-time and historic) in a consumable and accessible format. In turn, technology strategies must be implemented to deliver these…

A 1994 ground breaking paper on product development suggested that there were two kinds of product development – a traditional analytical one moving through defined stages from the abstract to the specific as a problem solving process and another based on interpretive and continuous dialogue.[i] The analytical approach assumes we can work out what customers want,…

Our Microsoft finserv team is seeing a major uptick in financial services firms and partners looking to leverage Microsoft Azure public cloud offering. Windows Azure and the cloud offer a paradigm shift in computing where a company can outsource all aspects of running their software except for their application logic and data. Windows Azure is…